Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.

Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #534 - Dreams part eight

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #534 - Dreams part eight

Hi Mom, I have been saving these up since September. It's time post.

A little different format for dreams. I remember pieces from the last two nights, so instead of trying to construct a narrative, here's the pieces. Dates are always when I wake up not when I went to sleep.

1609.26-1609.27

- I was helping my sister with some projector with big display boards and felt, a color-form. Lori was little again, four or five. I am just me, no clear sense of age. You are there, Mom, even though we know you're dead. But then there's also the sense that you have "recovered." You're wearing that green and white striped top you liked so much. You have managed to get yourself up out of your wheelchair and are standing nearby on your own. Your arms are holding the back of a chair, but you are standing on your own. At first, we have to tune you in like a radio. Your speech is garbled and warbled, the sounds stretched like taffy, indistinct, though we catch phrases. We tune you in, and you have things to say to us, important things. I don't remember what these things are when I wake up.

- You and I are watching some movie together, Mom. My friend Laura wants to come over. This is at the West Gull Lake Drive house, so she has to enter by coming up the bridge. Laura doesn't want to watch what we're watching, which I think is Ghostbusters, so we switch to the new Star Wars film. You are laughing and enjoying yourself Mom. We're eating beef stew. I spit some as I am talking, and it lands on plastic placemat in front of me, and Laura wipes it off with her finger and licks it. This is a very strange detail that stuck with me. It's nothing Laura would ever do, but I though it a strange detail to have. I tell Laura about the upcoming Rogue One movie.

- My former friend Dean has had a stroke and is in the hospital. I decide to visit her. We are friends again and have forgiven all that took place between us.

- I have been teaching a playwriting class. I am walking out of the class room talking to a student who looks like the woman from the AT&T commercials, Milana Vayntrub, in a white dress with a light blue sweater. She is complaining about not being comfortable reading student work and offering feedback. I am trying to explain that this what we must do. We are walking the stairs in Brown Hall. We're near the top. I drop the things I am holding, which among the papers include a set of weekly comic books. The things wedge between the flights of stairs. If I am not careful, they will all slip into the space between the flights and fall all the way to the ground floor. I am trying to carefully nudge the things toward me, on to the step coming up, Milana is trying to help but I am nervous that any push the wrong will send the things falling away to be lost and ruined. But I succeed in recovering the things. I give Milana good advice on how to be a student in this course and succeed.

- I have gone into the Michigan News. The cashier tells me "welcome back" as I have not been in here in years. I am browsing the familiar sections: science fiction books, comics, movie magazines, computer magazines, music magazines. I am going to buy something. Dean is still in the hospital. I feel comfortable here, but know I am just here this one time. I will not be back again.

1610.05

I am with Liesel and driving Dad's Cadillac. It is winter, and there's a couple inches of slushy snow on the roads. We're on our way to meet you and Dad for lunch. In this dream, Mom, you are still alive. I am coming up to a curve, like the big ones in Battle Creek on the business loop that runs over to Dickman Road. I am coming in somewhat hot, and so I try to brake, but my foot can't find the pedal. I miss. I try again. I hit the gas. I accelerate. I am sliding more. The car is fishtailing sideways. I decide that braking might cause us to spin or even roll, so I let the slide take us off the road. We hit a grassy median, which starts to slow down the car. I don't want to damage Dad's car, so I am trying to steer into the slide and hope we don't hit a tree or something. But I didn't see that this is a marshy median and suddenly we're in the water and the car starts to sink. There's a large pond or lake farther out, and the water is sucking us in that direction. I try to drive out of this marsh, but the tires just spin and we begin to sink more and drift toward the big and deep water. I jump out of the car, asking Liesel to take the wheel. My feet find some purchase in the marsh, and I push on the driver's side open door and direct the car back to solid ground. Liesel steers. We work together. She gives it a little gas, and as I push, somehow, I manage to lift the car up out of the muck, aided magically in the dream by the water and a little acceleration. Though the dream ends here, I know we will get out of the marsh and make it to meet you and Dad for lunch with the car unharmed (though wet).

1610.18

So I dreamed that I had been called on to leave the planet. This idea was introduced into my mind by reading an article about the risks involved in a year-long space flight to Mars and the possibility of damage by the radiation of cosmic rays. Elon Musk is planning a mission to create a settlement on Mars, which surely a one-way trip.

In my dream, I am going. I have no choice. So, I am trying to put my affairs in order. I am trying to decide how many books I can bring because there's an issue with the amount of data we can bring. I must leave all comic books behind. I am trying to sort clothes and choose just enough clothing items, though not too many.

A large part of the dream had to do with giving away some kind of medication that others may find useful. It was medication for depression, and I was consulting someone who knew Doug, the owner of Mac's Garage better than me. He never seemed like someone who needed medication for depression. But I am giving it to him any way because I have to get rid of it.

There's more that's lost to me now that I am awake, but the core of the dream is anxiety about the things I own and my wife's desire to move across the country, or to Hawaii, which sometimes feels like another planet.

1611.18

The night of the second big text I took in Discrete Math, so my brain was buzzing. It took me a long time to get to sleep. I had this dream around 4 a.m. because I woke up and had to pee at around 4:40 a.m. I was in some house that felt like home but was a mix of all the homes I have known: our old Hazelwood home, the West Gull Lake Drive home, your family home, Mom, in New Lothrop, and others. Stephanie Gauper was there and we were discussing books and things. You were there Mom, and I was explaining to Stephanie how you had died, but now were alive again. You were showing lots of energy. At one point in the dream, you were still bed ridden. But then later as I talked about your condition, you were moving around, cleaning, cooking, and organizing things. Your clothes kept changing, too, and at one point you were wearing a reddish-brown wig in something like your normal hair style, with the hair done up on your head. The stand out clothing I remember is that rust-colored sweater, you're in the picture I shared above. At a later point in the dream, Stephanie were discussing zombies because this was a thing that re-animated the dead at this time when the dream takes place. And yet, you were not a zombie, Mom. Your flesh had blood flow and was not rotten. You could talk and move more quickly. You were not slack-jawed. And we commented specifically on how you did not have the hunger for human flesh and blood like the other zombies, but that we should watch you to make sure you did not "turn" because the first sign of this change might be taking a bite out of one of us. As we discussed this, I looked at you, and you were licking some rubber toy thing in much the way a dog would and so I had my suspicions about what that might mean (the hunger for flesh might be growing in you). And yet, I believed and asserted to Stephanie that you were truly alive and not a zombie and not going to become a zombie, though there was that small amount of doubt.

It was not until after I woke up and thought about the dream that I remembered you had been cremated and so your body is gone; this re-animation, this coming back to life, can't happen, not with that body. Then I thought about my sister's belief that you have a new body in Heaven and wondered if part of my dream came from hearing her talk about that belief.

1612.21

I was visiting Paris and a friend had offered to show me around. There was a great deal of situating that needed to be done. Door locks, clothing, gear, the timing of the walk about town, deciding for stairs or the elevator, making sure I knew where my passport was and it was not on my person, and so on.

Later in the dream, after getting out of the apartment and seeing some of the city, I sat down and wept because of how much I missed you, Mom. I wept for a long time.

NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.

I am Christopher Tower the gmr

I am Christopher Tower (or Chris), and I am a writer of stuff. I live in Michigan. I play Ultimate, ride a bike, and supposedly educate college persons while myself being educated in college. I am married with two kids, a beagle, a curly lab, and a grouchy black cat. I like sushi. I love all SF, fantasy, comic books, D&D, board games, and Gnosticism. I am a Jungian. I am currently studying computer science at WMU.

EFF

Satchel

SENSE OF DOUBT STATUS AS OF 0705.04 - 16:45

Sense of Doubt is not currently dedicated to any themes or special interest. The subject matter is mine and may range from comic books to ultimate or from Baseball to feminist-centered media criticism. Until I feel I have enough content for multiple blogs, or until I am seized with a desire to create multiple blogs, this is it, and appropriately so. "Sense of Doubt" came about in Bowie’s Berlin period and the dark, ambient collaborations with Brian Eno. Like the Bowie of 1978, I have my own darkness that steals over me and through me, infecting everything. At the risk of sounding far too melodramatically obsessed with my own self-flagellations, this blog dedicates itself to that darkness, that infection. But it’s fun, too. Hey, I can be amusing? Or not. It’s the way of the [w]rench. Neurosis compelling action in insecure double-checking and misunderstanding evasions. It is my way.

More from the original description text that needed editing in 2015: Furthermore, Sense of Doubt is dedicated to the random. The theme is no theme. Just questions, doubt, and uncertainty. Feel the power of not knowing the answer. So dedicated on the last day of July 2006 by the Galactic Monkey Wrench.

The Blog about my job

It's about how my identity was taken from me by the powers that think they be, an identity, a job, I held for ten years. Go there if curious.

the galactic monkey wrench

The Galactic Monkey Wrench

This is the logo of the Galactic Monkey Wrench. I was given the nickname Galactic Monkey Wrench in college by a friend of mine who felt that I threw the monkey wrench into the cosmos at every available opportunity. Later, in discussions with my best friend, who isthe Lord of Chaos (the Loc), he asked for my title and when I told him, without thinking, he blurted out "the gmr!" Since this was random and we appreciate randomness, I became the gmr, even though technically I should be the gmw. But gmw sounds like a car or some industrial manufacturing firm that makes a strange widget of which one has never heard.
This acronym fetish may make no sense to anyone else, but my friend and I are quite driven to provide acronyms for many things. At the very least, it allows us to keep our conversations obscure and often private as no one knows about what we're talking.

Sense of Doubt Rare video

the gmrstudios repository of doubt

Christopher Tower's Facebook Posts

Monkey Wrench Books

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